History of Western Maryland. J. Thomas Scharf
CHAPTER I. TOPOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY.
The section of country embraced in the following descriptive outline is a long strip, running from east to west, widened on the ends, and extending from the western boundary of Baltimore County to the extreme limits of Maryland next to West Virginia. It consists of six large counties, among the most fertile, varied, and populous in the State. These are Frederick, Montgomery, Washington, Allegany, Carroll, and Garrett Counties. This region is bounded on the north by Mason and Dixon's line, which separates it from Pennsylvania, and on the south by the Potomac River, whose bending channel breaks the outline into a series of long and short curves, and cuts it off from West Virginia and Virginia. It might be regarded as of the form of a low bridge or arch, the keystone of which would be placed at Hancock (where the county is narrowed to a breadth of only one and a quarter miles); the wider end would rest on the District of Columbia, and the narrower end would stand on the source of the north branch of the Potomac River. The length of this strip is about one hundred and forty miles, and the width is about fifty miles, from north to south, across the east, and nearly thirty-six miles, in the same direction, across the west end.
It embraces almost every variety of surface within the State, the lowlands at tide-water and the ocean shores only being excepted. For convenience, the region may be divided into four great sections, marked by well-distinguished features of the surface, and coinciding sufficiently with the groups of rocks upon which it rests.
As no part of the Tide-water Belt strictly occurs within this territory, the first to be noticed is the Midland Belt. It begins about five miles back of the inner limits of the tides in the rivers, such as the Potomac and Patuxent, and extends westward to an oblique line running from the mouth of the Monocacy River to the sources of Piney Creek, in Carroll County.
The second is the Blue Ridge Belt, which runs from the basin of the Monocacy and the head-waters of Piney Creek to the west side of the summit of the Blue Ridge, or South Mountain range.
The third is the Great Valley, extending from the western side of the summit of South Mountain to the corresponding part of the summit of North Mountain. It is occupied chiefly by the extension of the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, which is widely known as the Hagerstown Valley, and which, southwest of the Potomac River, becomes the great Valley of Virginia.
The fourth is the extensive Appalachian Belt. This is pre-eminently the mountain region, and extends from the summit of North Mountain to the western boundary of the State.
Each of these divisions includes smaller belts and tracts of country, which may be recognized by a difference in the quality or color of the soil, and by the kinds of native rocks which rest near the surface.
Midland Belt. — This embraces the greater part of the two most eastward counties, Montgomery and Carroll. The lowest lands occurring within its limits belong to the southern extremity of Montgomery County, where the primitive rocks dip beneath the soil to stretch off under the deep basin of the Chesapeake Bay. These are tracts of clay, gravel, and sand, the former resting directly upon the eroded surfaces of granite, gneiss, and hornblende, and the latter spread over the surface of the low hills of clay and rock by floods and by the retreating tides of a former ocean. Several of these areas reach back into the country for a distance of nearly seven miles, while the more gravelly portions are confined to a belt varying in width from two to five miles. The clay area extends through the District of Columbia and Prince George's County into this region, chiefly along the ancient valleys of the streams, spreading more broadly from thence, and covering parts of the adjacent hills. On the northwest of the former the surface rises gradually by a series of rounded plateaus, until it culminates about twenty miles back in the folds and crest of Parr's Ridge. An altitude of about nine hundred feet is now attained, and the backbone of this range is seen to stretch away from near the Potomac River on the southwest in a wavy line, through the eastern part of Carroll County in a north-northeast direction, then with a backward bend as Westminster is reached, and across the boundary into Pennsylvania. It forms a high fold in the talcose slates, which, decomposing, serve to furnish a fairly light and kind soil, capable of being made very productive of all the cereals and fruits of temperate climates. A fine agricultural tract is also seen to spread away on both sides, presenting large farms of real fertility, and attesting the thrift of the inhabitants, whose ample barns and well-kept houses greet the eye on every hand. The soils belonging to this system of rocks extend as far as to the base of the Sugar-Loaf Mountain on the west, interrupted in the west corner by the red sandstone soils, and on the east extend as far as to the boundary of the archaean lands on Rock Creek. They also send off two tongues of the same kind of soil, the one reaching to near the northern . angle of the District of Columbia, and the other running parallel with the Patuxent River as far as to the source of Paint Branch. The ridge forms the dividing line between the creeks and rivers which flow towards the east and south and those which course southwest and west. In most parts the scenery offers a pleasing variety, but the wildest and most romantic spots are to be met with in the thinly-settled section on the headwaters of the various tributaries of the Patuxent River. There the hills are abrupt, high, and broken, flanked along the sides by lower and more rounded knobs, which have lost their former angular summits by reason of the softer and less resisting materials of which they are composed. Deep, sudden ravines, set with angular and piled-up rocks, are seen at frequent intervals, and through these the limpid waters of the rivulets and branches leap with never-ceasing activity over moss-covered bowlders, amid the tangled branches of flowering bushes and creeping vines. On these ridgy hills, too, the principal forests still remain. Second-growth trees of various kinds — oaks, hickory, walnut, beech, maples, sour-gum, dogwood, tulip-poplars, elm, hazel, a few pines, and numerous chestnut-trees — still serve to cover the wilder places and store: the moisture to feed springs and rivulets.
As usual, the dark-gray and silvery minerals composing the rocks of this region are attacked by the atmosphere, frost, and heat; they crack into slaty joints, change to a rusty color, and then disintegrate into a pale-yellowish micaceous and aluminous soil. Moisture, supplied by the morning and evening vapors, creeps into these, in common with many other kinds of cleaving, cracking rocks, carries carbonic acid and other! solvents into the interstices between the grains, and sets up chemical activities which rapidly reduce them to powder.
Commencing in Montgomery, on the southeast, the country rises by series of water-worn plateaus, or hills, with shallow, narrow depressions intervening, giving the effect of interrupted table-lands. The roads intersect ledges and masses of granite, gneisses, horn-blende schists, and, at the lowest levels, the black hornblende rocks. As in Baltimore and Howard, so here, this latter seems to be the bed-rock which underlies, holds, or gives rise to all the later ones of the formation. It crops out in the beds of the streams, such as Rock Creek, Paint Branch, and the tributaries of the Potomac south of the Great Falls, and is also indicated in places adjacent to the Patuxent. It underlies the mica schists where in most places their lower exposures are visible, and it forms bowlders on the sides of the hills and partly in the drift of the lower and central parts of this county. Crossing the rolling slope which descends immediately west of Parr's Ridge, the valley of the Monocacy River is reached, and the talcose slates become more aluminous. Here and there chains of high domes stretch from the northeast towards the southwest, and the higher swellings are seen to be composed of the tougher beds of the rock, while the lower undulations appear more shattered, broken next the surface into small fragments, and exhibit marked evidences of decay. Near the mouth of the river erosion and frequent washings have opened out a wide basin, which is now covered by the alluvium of this stream. It has thus brought some of the best fertilizing ingredients of the distant rocks within the reach of the agriculturist, who has thus been enabled to profit by the opportunity to secure most abundant crops of Indian corn, clover, hay, etc. On the northwestern side of this county a broad belt of red sandstone hills runs down to the bed of the Potomac River. They begin a little east of Seneca Creek, and extend to within a few rods of the mouth of the Monocacy River. These rise in their more central parts in majestic piles, like huge ranges of masonry, swelling to a height of more than one hundred and fifty feet above the basin of the Potomac. Colossal chimney-rocks stand up like tall sentinels on the dark-brown walls of precipitous sandstone, and craggy peaks jut out at various angles over the vast piles of overthrown